“Just lie flat, or you could get killed,” warned Nagwa Musa Konda, the director of a local aid organization, as a plane growled closer.
Despite an agreement signed only days ago to bring peace to this part of central Sudan, it seems to be sliding inexorably toward war.
Young men here in the Nuba Mountains are being mobilized into militias, marching into the hills to train. All the cars in this area, including humanitarian vehicles, are smeared with thick mud to camouflage them from what residents describe as unrelenting bombings. And opposition forces vow to press their fight until they win some form of autonomy, undeterred by the government’s push to stamp them out.
“It’s going to be a long war,” said Ahmed Zakaria, a doctor from the Nuba Mountains who recently quit his job to become an opposition fighter. “We want a secular, democratic state where we can be free to rule ourselves. Like Kurdistan,” Dr. Zakaria said, smiling. “And we will fight for it.”
The conflict is overshadowing one of the biggest events in Sudan’s history: the independence of the southern part of the country and the creation of two Sudans. In just over a week, southern Sudan will officially break off from the north, the capstone of decades of civil war and years of international negotiations to stave off further bloodshed.
But the fighting in the Nuba Mountains, which sit in the north’s territory, underscores how fractured Sudan will remain even after the south secedes. The same demands being espoused by opposition fighters here have been the kindling for major conflict — and major suffering — in several other corners of northern Sudan, where the government is determined to keep a firm grip across a country of diverse groups clamoring for their rights.
In the few towns in this vast landscape of terraced mountainsides and thatched-roof villages, the northern government has been amassing tanks, rocket launchers, artillery and thousands of soldiers and allied militiamen, either to pressure Nuba leaders into disarming or to prepare for a major offensive once the rains stop in a few months.
While the hillsides are slick and muddy, the government can do little but bomb, as it admits doing. But government officials say their fight is solely with opposition fighters, not with civilians, contending that widespread reports of civilian casualties are fabrications intended to rally Western nations against Sudan.
“The government is trying to control and take care of the people for peace and security and actually defeat and remove all the traces of rebels from the area,” said Rabie A. Atti, a government spokesman. “We are not against the people,” Mr. Atti added.
But as the conflicts in the western region of Darfur and southern Sudan long before that have proved, counterinsurgencies often cast a wide net.
At a small, mountainside hospital here in Lewere, an entire ward is filled with victims who said they were at a well, fetching water, when they were bombed. Most are children. Their whimpers filter through the mesh windows, along with the pungent smells of antiseptic solution and decaying flesh.
Inside, Winnasa Steven, a 16-year-old girl, writhed on a cot. From her hip, doctors cut out a three-inch chunk of ragged shrapnel, which her mother keeps, wrapped in white paper.
“I am in big pain,” Winnasa said.
Next to her, a toddler cried, his face a map of bandages. Not far away, a little girl sucked down spoonfuls of porridge. Her mother tried not to look at the gaping hole in her leg.
Arshad Arbab/European Pressphoto AgencyNasrullah Afridi, a local journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan, was killed by a bomb planted in his vehicle.